Colors of orange, brown, crimson and faded green. Tree trunks are the foundation of the colors as they splay along the branches. Tendrils of lime green grass seem to caress the very base of the tree as if some form of odd dance. The leaves brush along each other causing the colors to clash. Green and red pressed together like some Christmas day special. Green and brown bringing the earthy tones. The stray yellow leaf with spots of red. So red, it was as if the leave was bleeding. It drifts down to the ground to become part of the decomposition. The foundation of the forest.

Inhale. The taste of dirt, crispy earth as if you’ve taken a mouthful of grass (without the bugs). It’s cool, not hot, the feeling on your tongue is familiar, it’s as if you have flashbacked to your childhood days of playing in the leaf piles and dirt. You can taste the smell of the earth.

Swishing sounds of tattered leaves, falling to the ground to collect along the piles of the dead before them. Groaning sounds of branches grinding along each other, the air humming through the stray branches as an odd rustle picks up in time for all the leaves to fly up into the air. A mini cyclone forms as the leaves rush around you. You can hear the air, a white noise. You can hear the leave, crackling and decomposing in the wind around you, until the wind gives up allowing them to clash back along the ground. You take a step. Crunch. The leaves fall apart your misguided step.

Your hand reached out to brush along the trunk of the tree. The bark is rigid, neutral, as if it doesn’t have a temperature. You move your fingertips up feeling the edges of the bark pull along your top layer of skin, and yet it feels oddly comforting. Leaves trickle down like tickling rain as they brush like a rougher silk along your skin. They feel crispy, one step away from their short demise. The wind is cool, refreshing even. The leaves fall along the pile of their fallen brethren. You turn and throw your back into the leaves, feels the crunchy cushion. Soft, stable, firm, and only a little itchy, but somehow it feels of home.

Slowly inhale, you can smell the dirt, the wet smell of the grass. The wind would pick up bringing the smell of pine and autumn around you. The season of the clashing temperature. The smell of the leaves decaying into almost a dusty smell. Even as you fall back into the leave you smell the bright lively leaves above clashing with the decaying leaves below as if you are the line between their life and death.

Fall is my favorite season, it brings so much color to my life. It causes all my senses to go into overdrive. The next time you see a leaf pile tackle a loved one into it for me, and remember we are alive, and what a glorious life this is.